Another Gritty Memoir from the Cop Shop   

The Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago
By Robert Blau
Addison-Wesley

The Cop Shop: True Crime on the Streets of Chicago
By Robert Blau
Addison-Wesley
252 pages; $19.95

It will be a long time before any cop-beat memoir tops Edna Buchanan's "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," but every police reporter seems determined to try.

Two years ago, David Simon of the Sun in Baltimore produced the excellent "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets," which was the basis of a short-lived television series. Last year, New York Newsday's Mitch Gelman offered "Crime Scene."

Now the Chicago Tribune's Robert Blau steps up. Blau isn't Buchanan. But "Cop Shop" is gritty and readable, and it dramatically reinforces, as if we needed it, the terrible everydayness of violence and depravity, and the increasing defeatism within the law enforcement community.

Blau begins, as the genre generally prescribes, as an eager but naive reporter bearding the Byzantine, slightly hostile precinct houses. At first, the police are sullen and uncommunicative, leaving him "trying for the right mix of forcefulness and supplication that would squeeze facts out of onions." Slowly, he fits in. Eventually he's bowling with the undercover force and worrying that every "officer-down" call involves someone he's become close to.

The crimes are savage and relentless, like the case of an 11-month-old boy dangled by his left hand into a tub of scalding water. As the atrocity rate rises, so does the threshold for publication: "Rapes were not stories unless there were at least ten rapists... Fires..unless there were at least three people killed. Then you could expect about five column inches per victim."

Victims are at times almost unbearably stoic, like the grandparents of a 16-year-old murder victim relieved that "at least they didn't set him afire, the way they did the boy next door."

Like most of us who have covered the cop beat, Blau vacillates between anything-for-a-headline cynicism and stop-the-madness evangelism. While he sometimes sees his job as providing "epitaphs with orange juice" and "shaking down crying mothers for interviews," he can be lyrically sensitive:

"On good days you..knocked on strangers' doors, and walked in past rumpled carpeting and holes in the floor — past pictures of Jesus in cheap wooden frames, past singed vats of beans and bacon grease — into the room of the son who had been stabbed to death, of the daughter who had been shot to death, where golden trophies tumbled over each other and posters of Ferraris or Michael Jordan drooped from the walls. You took a seat at a Formica table in the kitchen and listened as a parent told the child's whole life story to you and no one else."

To novice reporters looking for secrets, Blau doesn't offer much new. He's not above letting himself be mistaken for a cop, and he'll keep his notebook out of sight till he gets them talking, and he passes along an editor's pithy advice about the writing: "Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry." But, oddly, he doesn't quote much from his copy, and he offers nothing to match Edna Buchanan's magnificent chapter "Getting the Story."

He does hit on a big issue raised by the very proliferation of these books: Why can't daily journalism rise above the soulless superficiality of body counts? Why must cop reporters turn to books for a narrative charge?

"The big answers," Blau writes, "were buried much deeper than newspapers or television could reach."

Really? In an age where the press thrashes every which way for relevance, there must be some way for newspapers to convey society's most primal street struggles. Longer stories? A revival of the serial form, in which investigations unfold as episodes? More after-the-fact, true-crime storytelling? More writing from the point of view of victims, or officers, or middle-school drug pushers? Perhaps the next police reporter in line for a book contract can better show us the way.